Sep 16, 2023 | Essays, Non-Fiction |
Now that my daily duties involved a baby, I’d simply expanded my instrumental approach to accommodate the new reality: I wanted to know that I was doing whatever was required to obtain optimal future results in the domain of child-rearing as well. Except that...
Feb 11, 2023 | Essays, Non-Fiction, Travel |
There is no anti-depressant quite like sea-swimming, and Holkham is where I usually go when I’m feeling sad. Striking out into the enormous expanse of cold sea, over the vast sands, I immerse myself like the fox ridding himself of his fleas. I leave my devils on the...
Jan 7, 2023 | Essays, Images, Non-Fiction |
aka America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly As Walt Whitman gazed down the democratic vistas of culture, he tried to see beyond the difference between beauty and ugliness, importance and triviality. It seemed to him servile or snobbish to make any discriminations of...
Nov 26, 2022 | Essays, Images, Non-Fiction |
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never...
Oct 22, 2022 | Essays, Non-Fiction |
The political union of 1707 had been preceded by a natural one over 400 million years earlier. England was attached to a small continent called Avalonia, drifting northwards across the ocean. At the same time, several thousand kilometres away, Scotland was heading...
Oct 8, 2022 | Essays, Non-Fiction |
The Nineties began on January 1 of 1990, except for the fact that of course they did not. Decades are about cultural perception, and culture can’t read a clock. The 1950s started in the 1940s. The sixties began when John Kennedy demanded we go to the moon in...